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2 posts categorized "Best Buy"

If you've been to a BestBuy, you've probably seen those funny Volkswagen Beetles and Geeky looking guys in white shirts, black pants, white socks, and of course a clip-on tie. That's the GeekSquad. They come to your home and help you glue your network together, fix computers, set up big screen and home theater.

As a Board Member of HomeGrid Forum, there's more to this than meets the Geeky-eye. Agent Meister talks about the needs for wired home networks, increasing demand for bandwidth, connected TV's and much more.

Last night as I was running some
errands, I drove by and decided to pay a visit to my local Best Buy where I
live in San Antonio.I walked
through the myriad of big screen TVs and of course the way cool Magnolia
Theater section of the store.

I needed to do this in order
think through a bit more about how and why Best Buy’s role as a Board Member of
the HomeGrid Forum will impact the future of the wired home network.

Then it hit me.

Being an AT&T U-verse
customer, I must confess that my brain has been way too service provider-centric
since I have been living on HomePNA for the past three years.

The “ah-ha” moment came to me
when I realized that in one fell swoop, the big box retailer will be the key
driver in the migration to the next generation of wired home networking - the
G.hn standard.Now that Circuit
City is dead, Best Buy controls what U.S. consumers buy in terms of consumer
electronics, home appliances, and computers.

Best Buy wants to make sure that
when a customer walks in the door to shop and hopefully buy, the entire
experience is excellent. While I haven’t spoken to Best Buy, my guess is they
probably realize all too well that the home networking experience today is not
that great an experience. There are too many standards, different devices that don’t
work well together and as a result, customers get confused and return their
products.

Best Buy can fix all that. By
pushing TV, appliance, computer and network device makers towards a common
standard like G.hn, Best Buy can do more to help rally the industry around a
unified approach to the connected home.Plus, what Best Buy does in the U.S. will impact what other big box
retailers in other parts of the world.

My guess is once Best Buy decides
to embrace G.hn in full, every hardware company will have to migrate from
existing standards such as HomePlug, MoCA and HomePNA to G.hn. This probably
won’t happen overnight. It will probably take years. Still, I can’t hardly wait
and see how Best Buy makes it all work seamlessly together.

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Everywire is a blog that will talk about G.hn and related wired networking news.